Culture More and more shoplifting in Berlin - while the Berlin law enforcement is busy going after people who allegedly insulted politicians on Twitter. Welcome to socialism

Translation by yours truly. Original article [A] by Danisch

More and more shoplifting in Berlin​


And you're wondering why the stores are closing down and online shopping is booming.

[Berliner Zeitung]: Dramatic increase in shoplifting in Berlin

Theft in Berlin retail shops is becoming an ever bigger problem.

The RBB is reporting on this. According to the retail industry association, mostly luxury articles and expensive cosmetics are being stolen. And organized theft gangs are a big problem.

RBB 24: Health food store chain's existence is threatened by shoplifting

The amount of shoplifting is sharply growing in the [German] capital. The health food store chain "Demski" is being stolen from badly enough that the Berlin-based family company sees its existence threatened.

[...]

The store smells like ethereal oils and tea, quiet music is playing in the background. But the impression is misleading. The cream packaging is empty. The honey glasses are just dummy items, the nutritional supplements are locked behind glass doors and every single olive oil bottle has theft protection mechanisms. Because at "Demski", there is a lot of theft happening.

Everything is being stolen, shoplifters are especially targeting olive oil and expensive nutritional supplements. That is why these wares are now locked behind glass or are equipped with theft protection measures. "You can't put these things in the store without locking them up nowadays", Marc-Andreas Demski says.

Demski says that shoplifting grew sharply one or two years ago. Meanwhile, the scale is dramatic. "Every week we have to assume that a total of 10,000 euros is being stolen from us", Demski summarizes the problem. "It's causing sleepless nights for us and it has become so bad that it's threatening our existence."

[...]

The Demski couple isn't alone with that problem. Mainstream supermarket chains responded to rbb|24's information request with massively increased numbers when it comes to shoplifting. The number has gone up significantly in the past few years. This is also confirmed by the police. According to the federal crime statistics, in 2023, more than 400,000 cases of shoplifting have been registered in Germany. A year-on-year growth of 23 percent.

And more is being stolen in Berlin. This is confirmed by the Berlin police who have supplied numbers. In 2023, almost 40,000 shoplifting cases were documented in the capital city. That is almost 5,000 more than in 2022 and roughly 10,000 more than in 2021. The police's shoplifting investigation success rate is high. From the 40,000 registered cases, the police were able to solve 35,000.

Why there is ever more shoplifting, the police can't make statements on. Nils Busch-Petersen, main director of the trade association of Berlin-Brandenburg, supports the hypothesis that it is not mainly because people have less disposable money available to them. "The popular picture that is being painted, of people stealing in order to survive, we can disprove if we look at the items that are being stolen." Mainly, luxury articles and expensive cosmetics are being stolen, Busch-Petersen says. And: The problem persists through all classes in society and all demographics.

Shoplifting has grown in Berlin - and the thieves get ever cockier. Businessmen report that even regular customers are stealing. For some, this is a threat to their existence.

— rbb|24 (@rbb24) December 5, 2024

And the judiciary in Berlin is comprehensively putting in effort with people who think [very fat Green Party politician] Ricarda Lang is fat or who allegedly insulted politicians on Twitter.

Here is a systematic destruction of society, especially this middle class. On top of that, you get these EU mandates like the product safety decree and all the other bureaucratic struggle. You could say that it's about systematically getting rid of the middle class and eventually setting up a GDR-like statist - and centrally planned and steered in every way - central economy in which it's being dictated who is able to buy how much and how many of what at what time.

And apparently, a central part of this plan is to drive up the incidence of shoplifting - like in the USA - to utilize it as a political tool to destroy everything that the politicians don't like. First they destroyed bakeries and so on by means of [expensive] energy and payroll expenses, and now they moved over to retail, who aren't that reliant on energy, because they only need light and a bit of heating.

What I find particularly concerning is that, in their stories and in the texts, they don't create the impression that it's just migrants, but as if the big theft is a general social development, it's becoming a popular sport now. The Berlin citizen has always been someone who makes use of every opportunity and isn't that strict with law. And it seems as if the big thievery is starting, as if everybody is stealing now. Because nothing is happening anymore, the judiciary is busy elsewhere.

I have reported on this strange gas station in South Africa, which is basically a normal gas station with a connected mini-mart (mini supermarket) like it was common in Germany, and where they, afterwards, welded together a kind of tunnel from iron bars in the supermarket, like for tigers in the circus, so that you could only walk in the store through that iron bar tunnel, but could no longer reach the shelves with the goods, and you told an employee, who walked next to you with a shopping basket, what you wanted to have, and only after paying at the cashier, you get handed a bag with the goods. The same is going to happen in Germany - or it basically has already happened if - like they say in the video and the text - only dummy articles can be put on the shelves.

But they wanted to "overcome the society of white man" - congratulations, you did it.

In the USA, this has led to many people barely or no longer being able to go shopping because all nearby stores have closed and the closest store is so far away that they can't afford the drive anymore. And that even in New York, recently, quite a new, billion dollar shopping mall had to close down because the shop owners could no longer operate the shops because of shoplifters, that was a thing too.

And when all the stores are gone?

Then the homes get looted.

But don't you dare say something against a politician.

Welcome to socialism.
 
I'm gonna take a shot in the dark here and say the shoplifters aren't named "Hans" or "Schmidt."
 
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